Abstract: In a popular and remarkably detailed narrative of life in seventeenth-century
Pembrokeshire, Wales, chronicler George Owen took particular pains to describe a sport
“rare to hear, troublesome to describe and painful to practise (sic).” Played during many
of the dozen annual festival days in Wales, the game was particularly violent, as hundreds
of players on opposing teams attempted to get a leather or wooden ball either into a goal
or across a determined end line (customarily the parish boundary) by any means
necessary. Thrown, carried, or struck with a club, the ball and its pursuers would careen
wildly through the Welsh countryside.
The game was called Cnapan. It found its way to Wales through an adaptation of
an earlier game played in Cornwall, and before that, in France. Although the basic sport
would be familiar to fans of modern-day games such as rugby or football, early modern
cnapan was purely a local Welsh pursuit. The communal nature and method of play of the
game, and its ferocious intensity were not found elsewhere in western Europe, and
certainly not in the British Isles, where sport was beginning to undergo a transformation
towards more organized, “respectable” sports, and Welsh cnapan aroused suspicion in
England. The sight of thousands of half-naked Welshmen roaming the countryside met
with an official English response, and in the county of Pembrokeshire, the response was
criminal prosecution of cnapan players, ostensibly on a charge of rioting. The English
desire for order and legislation manifested itself in the weapon of legal action in the
Courts of Quarter Sessions.
Can the development of this peculiar Welsh sport and the English legal response
it engendered answer larger questions about the nature of the early modern Anglo-Welsh relationship? Through the sport and its opposition I will examine a particular facet of that
relationship – the development of an early modern Welsh cultural identity. Similar to the
expressions of Welsh bardic poets and the Cymric language itself, cnapan was a distinct
element of Welsh identity, despite the arguments of English scholars that any sense of
Welshness was subsumed very quickly in the years after the Tudor Acts of Union of 1536
and 1543.
Cnapan and its uniquely Welsh character contradicts that argument, and may
force historians to refocus their arguments away from nationalist-centered stories –
which have tended to marginalize Wales – towards broader examinations of the
interactions of cultural identity. Historians have long identified a strong link between
sport and national identity, and such a link has been particularly identified in other parts
of the Celtic fringe. I will argue that Cnapan was a vibrant and heretofore marginalized
facet of that identity, and will also attempt to challenge existing historiography to open
new avenues of discovery for England’s western neighbor.